12/07/2012

Bob Costas Digs Himself in Deeper on the O'Reilly Factor

Bob Costas appeared on the O’Reilly Factor Wednesday night in an
effort to explain his ill-informed comments about guns that he made over
the weekend.

Using one of Sunday’s football games as a platform
to express his views on guns, Costas (who was quoting a sports writer)
said that the Kansas City linebacker who killed himself and his
girlfriend this past weekend would still be alive today “if Javon
Belcher didn’t possess a gun.”

Because Costas’ remarks have stoked a nation-wide
controversy, O’Reilly invited Costas onto his show to clear away the
“confusion.” Taking his cue, Costas led off the interview
saying that he knows Americans have a right to bear arms and that he
never intended to enter the political debate surrounding this issue.

He emphasized several times that he never used the
words “gun control,” and that he is not looking to repeal the Second
Amendment.

But rather than set the record straight, Costas
only made things worse with several bone-headed or factually inaccurate
statements. Rather than clear up the matter, Costas adopted
the talking points of several anti-gun “Brady Bunch” organizations by
saying Americans are worse off owning guns, that they don’t typically
use them in self-defense, and that Americans need to do something about
our dangerous “gun culture.”

Here are just some of most egregious examples (although one comes from Bill O’Reilly):

1. Myth: Guns do more harm than good.

“Even if one has the right to have the gun --
you got this many guns out there -- far more often, bad things happen
(including unintentional things) than things where the presence of a gun
diminishes or averts danger.” – Bob Costas to Bill O’Reilly

Not true. Law-abiding citizens use guns to defend
themselves against criminals as many as 2.5 million times every year --
or about 6,850 times a day. This means that each year,
firearms are used more than 80 times more often to protect the lives of
honest citizens than to take lives.(1)

Even anti-gun researchers have conceded that guns are used 1.5 million times annually for self-defense. According to the Clinton Justice Department, there were as many as 1.5 million cases of self-defense with a firearm every year. The
National Institute of Justice published this figure in 1997 as part of
“Guns in America” -- a study which was authored by noted anti-gun
criminologists Philip Cook and Jens Ludwig.(2)

So where does the guns-are-more-likely-to-harm-you theory come from? Well,
it first appeared in the 1980s with a “study” performed by Dr. Arthur
Kellermann, who concluded that a gun in the home is supposedly more
likely -- far more likely, he claimed -- to kill the owner than to be
used in self-defense.

Interestingly, Kellermann refused to release the data behind his conclusions for years.(3) But subsequently, the nation discovered why Kellerman stonewalled for so long:

* All available data now indicates that the “home gun homicide victims [in Kellermann’s study] were killed using guns not kept in the victim’s home,” researcher Don Kates writes. In other words, the victims were NOT murdered with their own guns! They were killed “by intruders who brought their own guns to the victim’s household.”(4)

* In retrospect, Kates found, it was not the ownership of firearms that put these victims at high risk. Rather,
it was the victim’s “high-risk life-styles [such as criminal
associations] that caused them to own guns at higher rates than the
members of the supposedly comparable control group.”(5)

Even
using the conservative figures issued by the Clinton Justice
Department, Americans are 50 times more likely to use a gun in
self-defense than to be killed by a firearm.

The fact is, guns save far more lives … far more often than they take a life.

To read the rest of the article, please click here to visit the original GOA article.